Master of Mocchirolo

Room I A at Brera is a reconstruction of a building. The original stands about 25 km north of Milan at Mocchirolo, near Lentate sul Seveso, a private chapel put up by the Porro family, who served the Visconti lords of Milan. Its frescoes were painted between about 1360 and 1370 by a man whose name has never been recovered.

He is called the Master of Mocchirolo after the chapel, and Brera holds the whole cycle under one inventory number, 5555. A Crucifixion filled the end wall. On one side Saint Ambrose, the patron of Milan, sits enthroned and flogs two heretics. On the other the man who paid for the chapel kneels with his family. In 1949 the restorer Mauro Pellicioli lifted every scene off the plaster onto canvas, the owners handed them to Brera, and the museum rebuilt the chapel's shape indoors around them.

Attaching a name to the hand has been tried. The frescoes ran for a long time under Giovanni da Milano, a Lombard painter documented in Florence, and one proposal gives them to Pietro da Nova, recorded in Bergamo in the 1370s, a dating most scholars find too late for this painting. What is agreed is the tradition behind him, a painter who took up Giotto's weight and solidity the way Giusto de' Menabuoi and Tommaso da Modena, painters of the same years elsewhere in northern Italy, did. The chapel at Mocchirolo still stands, its walls bare apart from figures of prophets uncovered in a recent restoration.